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Documentary, BBC The Story of China 3 The Golden Age - 影片
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00:01In the 10th century, China almost broke apart forever in civil war.
00:15The soldier poet Wang Renu witnessed the destruction of his country.
00:24The barbarians have overthrown the Tang dynasty, he wrote.
00:28Our cities have been abandoned. Our temple courtyards lie in ruin.
00:38China has entered a truly dark time.
00:44But things cannot go on like this forever.
00:51The way surely has not been finally lost.
00:54I believe heaven will soon announce a new dynasty.
00:58And in around the year 960, it did.
01:00It did.
01:01It did.
01:02It did.
01:03It did.
01:06The waywardBeat
01:08To be continued to after this for today.
01:09It mourns the new kaf Side In this way.
01:11But as it does not become the现在 Jed Spider which is not reactive.
01:14It's not that they were so clever and we don't deserve that.
01:16The next 달� elevation in the circle is starting in fire.
01:18Full threenight.
01:20They build기에asta in sellselles for its fate.
01:23To be continued to cross the island.
01:25제遭売한 그녀�rel
01:28In the West, we see history as the rise and fall of different civilisations.
01:42In China, there's one civilisation which has gone through cycles of order and disorder.
01:49And in the Middle Ages, like Europe after the Second World War,
01:53the Chinese set out to build a brave new world.
01:58In the story of China, we've reached the Song Dynasty.
02:09We're in the city of Kaifeng, in the middle of China.
02:19A thousand years ago, this was the greatest and most exciting place on Earth.
02:25Its creativity and inventiveness surpassed and, of course, preceded the European Renaissance.
02:32In the Song Renaissance, the Chinese set out to make the most enlightened society on Earth,
02:43with the best governance, housing and food, the best education and science.
02:49This is their story.
02:50A thousand years ago, the Chinese set out to make the most important part of China.
02:52Since the great age of the Tang Dynasty, China had shrunk dramatically.
02:58After 907, it fragmented into 16 dynasties in a little over 50 years.
03:04Warlords fighting each other for the empire.
03:07At this point, there was no certainty that China would ever be reunited.
03:25But as it says in China's famous novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
03:30It is a truth universally acknowledged that everything long united will fall apart
03:36and everything long divided will come back together again.
03:45The Song would transform Kaifeng
03:47from a provincial backwater into the greatest city on Earth.
03:57And now it's rebuilding again.
04:00After the struggles of the 20th century,
04:03today's Chinese people are fascinated by the spectacle of what their ancestors achieved.
04:09And they want to touch that time again.
04:12And as always in Chinese history,
04:17great events were foretold by signs and omens.
04:23Here in Kaifeng, the most famous tells of the birth of two brothers
04:27who, like Romulus and Remus,
04:30would become the first emperors of the new dynasty.
04:37The story goes like this.
04:39At the time of chaos and war and destruction,
04:43after the fall of the Tang dynasty,
04:46a man called Chen Tuan
04:47fled to the sacred mountain Hua Shan,
04:50where he lived in a cave and became a hermit.
04:53And he acquired prophetic, visionary powers.
04:58And one day, he came off the mountain,
05:01and in the road, he met a crowd of refugees,
05:04and there was a poor man carrying two baskets on a pole on his shoulders.
05:09And when the hermit looked into the basket,
05:12there were two baby boys,
05:14but the hermit saw dragons.
05:17And he roared out with laughter.
05:21And everybody said,
05:22Why are you laughing?
05:23And he said,
05:24I never expected that the mandate of heaven
05:28would come back to earth so quickly.
05:31He was fired.
05:33He said,
05:33I was in her place.
05:34He said,
05:34He wanted to come back to heaven with a bridge.
05:35And he said,
05:35How did he?
05:36He went back to heaven,
05:37and that he said,
05:38He said,
05:39He said,
05:39He said,
05:40He went back to heaven with a snake,
05:41but he said,
05:41He said,
05:48He said,
05:49He said,
05:51He said,
05:52He said,
05:53This is the one but we were living with Jah.
05:54He said,
05:54He said,
05:55He said,
05:56...
06:26Because this place is a
06:29hole.
06:30It's a...
06:31Like, now it's a
06:32hole.
06:33There's a road here.
06:35There's a road here.
06:36There's a road here.
06:38There's a road here.
06:39There's a road here.
06:40There's a road here.
06:41Great.
06:42Oh, fantastic.
06:43Bye-bye.
06:44Bye-bye.
06:45Bye-bye.
06:46There's the surviving dragon, the last dragon of Twin Dragon Alley.
07:04Any day now, Twin Dragon Alley will be redeveloped, and soon only the memory will remain.
07:09But that's Kaifeng for you.
07:15Here's city of memory.
07:18In 960, the older brother, Tai Zhu, announced the new dynasty, the Song.
07:25And he made the capital here a vast new metropolis of wood and brick thrown up in a feverish construction
07:32boom.
07:33This is Song Building Manual, commissioned in the early 12th century.
07:45If you are of a certain social status and if you can afford it, you can build your house
07:51according to these styles.
07:53So, this tells you how to build a city almost, doesn't it?
07:59Well, for a city of over a million people, you would need lots of buildings.
08:05Biggest city in the world, perhaps, at that time?
08:07Yes, definitely, at that time.
08:09And to go with the new buildings was a whole new conception of city life.
08:16Kaifeng was a much more open city.
08:18The lifestyle was much more vibrant than the Tang Chang'an.
08:22All sorts of shops, all sorts of restaurants, even fast food, there's mention of fast food.
08:32And there was no curfew.
08:34That was very important.
08:39The others, residents in the city, these urban dwellers, were supposed to stay in their
08:43own wards after the build.
08:47But in Kaifeng, they were allowed to just talk to the markets and enjoy their time.
08:53So, all the pleasures of city life really start to unfold in this time.
08:57Yes.
09:00So, a new capital for a new age, the largest city anywhere on earth until the 19th century.
09:11And just like today's China, the city became a magnet for people flooding in.
09:18In a few years, it went from one square mile to 16.
09:26Only a few ancient buildings survive today above ground.
09:32One of them is the famous Iron Pagoda, so-called because of the metallic sheen of its tiles.
09:42We're out in the northeast corner of the old city here.
09:47The Iron Pagoda is on a bit of raised ground in this corner.
09:51The emperor had built this artificial mountain called the Hill of Longevity.
09:55It's really wonderful, these Chinese names, aren't they?
10:00Compared with Rome or Constantinople, very little survives from Kaifeng's golden age.
10:06And you can see why when you look below the ground.
10:12Down here is evidence of 20 devastating floods of the Yellow River since the Song dynasty.
10:21This pit is a metaphor for the story of the city.
10:26I've called Kaifeng the city of memory, China's capital of memory.
10:32And in this pit underneath the west gate, you can see why.
10:36That is the Qing dynasty city wall, the 18th and 19th century Qing dynasty city wall.
10:43And this smaller brickwork here, the Ming dynasty wall, Tudor period, part of it carries on down.
10:51And the Song dynasty city wall, maybe 20 feet below the floor level here.
10:58It's amazing thought, isn't it?
11:00And the reason why?
11:02That huge deposit of Yellow River mud, which is only a few miles from the city.
11:08These floods have been incredibly destructive all the way through Chinese history.
11:12Sweeping through the whole city, destroying almost everything, even in recent times.
11:171842, for example.
11:20No wonder then that the city has been memorialised, if you like, not in stone, not in great buildings,
11:29but in words and in paintings.
11:32A million people thronged these streets, said a song poet.
11:45There were restaurants as far as the eye could see.
11:49Everywhere there was music in the air.
11:55What would we give to see that age again?
12:02But we can still see Song Kaifeng in China's most famous work of art.
12:14As historical sources go, this is one of the most fabulous that exists in the world.
12:22It's a scroll. It's nearly 20 feet long.
12:25I'd need to unroll it across the middle of the street if we were going to do that.
12:29It's simply a depiction of the city as it was just before 1127 by a court painter.
12:37And it's the life of the ordinary people.
12:39There is nothing like this in the whole of history.
12:44It gives you the streets, the alleyways, the hutongs, the shops, the taverns and restaurants.
12:54All of them real places.
12:56Mr. Wang's house.
12:59The spice shop.
13:01Shen Yang's licensed tavern.
13:06Physician Zhao's residence.
13:09The sugar cane shop.
13:12Dr. Yang's clinic.
13:15An amazing image of the sheer vitality of Song Dynasty China.
13:28Here, 400 years before the European Renaissance, with its commitment to human values,
13:34was a city dedicated to the prosperity and well-being of its people.
13:40A city for the many, not just the few.
13:45Not kings or warriors or the church, but the lives of ordinary people.
13:50It's an image of themselves the Chinese have loved ever since.
13:59So much so that they couldn't resist bringing it back to life.
14:03A journey back into a golden age.
14:07As one citizen recalled.
14:10There were such happy times.
14:13So many people and an abundance of things in the shops.
14:18The wonderful festivals.
14:20So many sights for the eye to enjoy.
14:24Above all, I remember the humane and congenial character of the citizens.
14:29Always ready to help a stranger.
14:32I feel very beautiful.
14:34A good time to live, do you think?
14:36I hope.
14:37The lamp-lit nights.
14:39The sounds of music from the myriad taverns and wine bars.
14:43But you see then, this was a time of peace.
14:48This is a very good place.
14:51This is a very good place.
14:53This is a very good place.
14:55This is a very good place.
14:57This is a very good place.
15:00This is a very good place.
15:02There are many legacies of the Song in today's China.
15:05And one that's become celebrated across the world.
15:08It's Chinese cuisine.
15:11The Song thought that people should be well fed.
15:17And eating became the great social ritual it is today.
15:21Chinese cooking, of course, is one of the great cuisines of the world.
15:26And the oldest cuisine in the world.
15:28But the beginnings line poor people's food.
15:34Here they fed both the posh and the working man.
15:38People have had to get used to making the best out of whatever food source they could lay their hands on.
15:45And to make it palatable.
15:48But by the time of the Song dynasty, it's, well, the first great restaurant culture of the world.
15:55The Chinese people by then are the best fed people in the world.
15:59Probably the best fed that had ever been in history.
16:02And there's wonderful accounts of the restaurant culture of the time.
16:08Seventy great restaurants here in Kaifeng.
16:11The waiters rushing from table to table, taking the orders.
16:16And rushing back from the hatch with three dishes of food down one arm and twenty bowls down the other.
16:23And never making a mistake, says one contemporary.
16:26And that restaurant culture brings you etiquette.
16:30How to behave at table.
16:32How to be considerate to your fellow diners.
16:35Not to rush.
16:36Not to chew loudly.
16:38To be careful when you're all eating from the same bowl.
16:42And that in turn, of course, brings you a kind of foodie culture.
16:47They've got cookbooks back in the Song dynasty.
16:50One of them has been reprinted ever since the last time in 2004.
17:00Pure recipes from the Mountain House cookbook.
17:03Oranges stuffed with crab meat.
17:06Bean curd, steamed with hibiscus flowers.
17:12And each one of these recipes has got delightful notes by the author telling you where he first picked it up.
17:19Take this one.
17:21Plum blossom noodle cake soup.
17:27I picked up this recipe from an old scholar in the Zimau Mountains on a beautiful snowy night.
17:36And whenever I taste it, the exquisite moment comes flooding back to me.
17:51Let's just move some space.
17:53In a restaurant in old Kaifeng, we asked the chef to make one of these 11th century recipes adapted for the vegetarian.
18:00There's a type of mushroom, pear, and lotus seeds.
18:15Lotus seeds.
18:16Yeah.
18:17So you mix mushrooms and fruit.
18:20That's very interesting.
18:22Because they have this function of, like, de-deflammation.
18:28Oh, wow.
18:33It's delicious.
18:34It's very good. Thank you.
18:37This is what we should do.
18:39He says it's his pleasure.
18:41Great.
18:42I'm going to finish this off, if that's all right.
18:44It's all right.
18:45The Mountain House Cookbook was one of thousands of books you could buy in Kaifeng.
19:03Publishing boomed, from vast imperial encyclopedias to poetry, history and ritual, and self-help manuals for the literate man and woman in the street.
19:16The Chinese had invented woodblock printing back in the tongue, one of many great inventions with which they led the world.
19:26And now in the Song, they devised moveable type too, although that never took off in the same way.
19:33The first mention of this is slightly after 1040, a person called Bisheng, um, using clay to print with, um, movable typeset.
19:47So each one of this is a Chinese character.
19:50Yeah.
19:51And they would form part of a page in a frame.
19:57But it wasn't taken up?
20:00No, no.
20:01The Chinese made this invention, which has proved so useful to the rest of the world.
20:05But they didn't find it useful.
20:08Why?
20:09It has to do with the, um, the Chinese characters, um, because there are so many of them.
20:16And, um, say, if you look at this page, almost every character is a different one.
20:22Economically, it wasn't viable, it wasn't efficient, especially compared to just using a single woodblock print.
20:29Too cumbersome for such a vast range of characters?
20:32Yes.
20:33And you can see exactly why when East met West in the 20th century with the typewriter.
20:39Each individual metal type is a Chinese character.
20:46You'd have to choose the right one by navigating this.
20:52And how many characters have they got for this machine, then?
20:55Probably, um, about 2,000.
20:58So, how many do you need to, um, negotiate, say, a newspaper in modern China, then?
21:04About 3,000 or 4,000 for sort of the average.
21:08So, strangely enough, although this seems very cumbersome to be carving woodblocks, it's actually much more efficient.
21:15Especially if a book stays in print for centuries, as they do in China.
21:20So, tell us about the readership in the sung, then.
21:23Does reading percolate down into ordinary people?
21:26Well, of course, there are the more, sort of, um, elite, uh, classes, uh, who, who can read and who are expected to read.
21:34But, definitely, literacy is spreading in a song.
21:41Even if they weren't, um, able to read themselves, they would be easily, um, able to find someone who can do that for them.
21:56One of the great things about the Sung dynasty is the attention to, what we would call, I suppose, civic values.
22:03They even published books on, on old age.
22:07This, you're not going to believe in this, but this is, is a book about, well, it's called,
22:14How to Help Old People Live Better, Longer and More Fulfilling Lives.
22:21And it was written in 1085.
22:24And it's gone through editions in every dynasty of China ever since.
22:29And this is the latest 2013 printing.
22:33How about that?
22:36Now, to care for old people, you have to look at the nature of their whole life.
22:41Everybody has things that they really like.
22:44Things that make them glad.
22:46Books and paintings, music.
22:49There are millions of things that people like.
22:53If a person frequently seeks out the things that they've loved all their life,
22:58and focuses on their essence, and has these things around them,
23:03it will give them endless joy and pleasure, and their days will be joyful.
23:08And today's citizens still follow the song's self-help message.
23:15There is a heart of joy.
23:16There is something that they want to do with a heart.
23:19This is how about the heart of their heart.
23:20The heart of their heart.
23:21It will be hard to beat their heart.
23:22There is a heart.
23:23It will be hard to think of.
23:24And it will be hard to think of.
23:25It will be hard to think of.
23:31They also need to be old people.
23:33There are so many things to do.
23:38When we so young, our brains will be no longer.
23:39We will have those where we are opposed to those who are past.
23:42good yeah so in its ideas about the good life the song went beyond any earlier
23:52civilization even the ancient Greeks and in science the list of their
24:00inventions is incredible from gunpowder and blast furnaces to the magnetic
24:08compass and evolution theory the most famous scientist came from a village down
24:19in Fujian on the south coast so song there is one of the great polymaths of the song
24:26dynasty and they don't come much more poly than him he was an engineer astronomer
24:31scholar and poet but he also wrote treatises on mineralogy and zoology and
24:37pharmacology it's real left brain right brain stuff isn't it but their
24:42education enabled them to be both artistic and scientific endlessly creative and
24:49endlessly curious he reminds you of some of the great figures of the Renaissance
24:54in Europe I suppose you could say that he's the Chinese Leonardo but to put it
25:00more correctly Leonardo is the Western so song
25:14this is so songs pet project an astronomical clock his proud hometown has just rebuilt a
25:24working replica 45 feet high its mechanism a water clock driven by an endless chain drive
25:31inside the clock there had to be a clock captain standing like a captain on the bridge of a boat 24 hours a day and periodically
25:38topping the water level up in the tank
26:02level up in the tanks. There you go. Wonderful, imagining this in the middle of Kaifong, ringing
26:11out the hours, 24 hours a day for the citizens as they go about their business. It's like
26:18the Song Dynasty's Big Ben. Scientific exploration thrived in the Song, in part because there
26:25was no theological straitjacket, holding back speculation on the nature of time and the universe.
26:34Look at this.
26:38See the goddess of mercy. It's a real women's cult here. Isn't this fantastic? It's a people's temple.
26:45Look at this. Taoism and Buddhism were the official cults of the Song Empire, but religion wasn't an
26:52area where the government intruded into people's lives. Though always watchful of foreigners,
27:00the Song, just like the Tang, had many Muslim and Christian communities, which still survive.
27:09And in Kaifong, so do the last of the Chinese Jews. This is Chinese Rosh Hashanah.
27:22Under the Song, the population of China doubled. 100 million in the year 1000. It was 200 million
27:31by the late 1200s, more than a third of the world's people. And with a huge urban population,
27:39just like the British in the 19th century, the Chinese invented many games and sports,
27:44including what they call kickball. We British, of course, pride ourselves on having invented the
27:51world's greatest game. And in a sense that the rules of modern football were established in Britain,
27:57in Sheffield, to be precise, in the 1860s, that's true. But as usual in this story, the Chinese got there
28:04first. Football was massive in the Song Dynasty a thousand years ago.
28:10So I suppose you could say, as the Chinese would,
28:17football's coming home.
28:22It wasn't a mass sport, of course, there was no such thing then.
28:34But football in the Song was a spectator sport, with clubs, handbooks, rules and fans.
28:40The Emperor's not arrived yet.
29:01The Emperor's not arrived yet.
29:04The Emperor's not arrived yet.
29:06The Emperor's not arrived yet.
29:08The Emperor's not arrived yet.
29:10The Emperor's not arrived yet.
29:12The Emperor's not arrived yet.
29:14Wow, wow.
29:16Different ways of playing the game in the Song Dynasty.
29:19The favourite one, the goals were posts about 10 meters high.
29:24The coloured net hung between them, with a hole through which you had to shoot the ball.
29:29And of course, being China, ethical conduct was vital.
29:37In Song football, it was play up and play the game.
29:42Abusing the referee was un-confusion.
29:46And professional fouls unthinkable.
29:50Well, almost.
29:51And football wasn't just for the elite.
30:17China was opening up socially.
30:20And that went for government too.
30:26There was definitely a lot of social mobility going on during the Song.
30:31The social classes were in flux in some sense.
30:36People from all sorts of backgrounds could engage more closely,
30:40who were more sensitive towards the social situation.
30:43They became involved in government too.
30:50New schools for learning opened up and
30:54academies were established as well that sought to teach the classics and also to
31:01foster good character.
31:03It was the great age of Confucian social values.
31:08And how they set about creating that ethos is startlingly modern.
31:14As you can see, it's freshest week here in Henan University in Kaifeng.
31:18The story of universities goes back a long way in China, much further back than in the West.
31:23And amazingly, here in Kaifeng, in the 11th century, there was a national university.
31:33In 1069, the emperor expanded the student body from a thousand to more than three thousand.
31:40They had financial support and board and lodging.
31:43And the big idea was to draw in students from the provinces, talented youngsters,
31:48perhaps even from middling or lower families, to come into the metropolis for the best education.
31:55And the goal, as the emperor put it himself, for the morality of the culture.
32:02As educationalists say today, the ethos is the thing.
32:06For the examinations, the students studied literature, history and Confucian classics.
32:17The emperor and his advisers were looking for tomorrow's administrators to govern a harmonious
32:22Confucian society.
32:27There was a new class of literati who previously perhaps didn't have the chance to sit through the
32:34examination system, but now they had.
32:41Confucian teachings were really at the core of these civil examinations.
32:47And because they had such an important role to play in those examinations,
32:52and that so many people took examinations, it meant that it was a way for Confucian ideas to really
32:59permeate into society. You could say that it was a meritocratic society, where excellence in learning was really prized.
33:13Meritocratic, but not universal. Half of the population were excluded from this educational revolution.
33:20Women.
33:23But ironically, it's through the writings of a woman
33:26that we get one of the best insights into the world of the song.
33:31These students are studying her work in today's university in Kaifeng.
33:36She's the poet Li Qing Zhao.
33:38Who is here? Who is here to be a teacher?
33:43So, there is someone saying,
33:44look, the man's back,
33:45the woman's back is the woman's back,
33:47the woman's back, the woman's back, the woman's back, the woman's back, the woman's back.
33:49So, Deshalb, she is the woman's back...
33:53Tita, the woman's back, the woman's back, the daughter of the satisfies,
33:55rank and has an illusion...
33:57Let's start.
34:27Li Qingzhao, she's one of China's greatest poets.
34:39Her father had encouraged her to write poetry from an early age and attend male poetic gatherings.
34:46And she was already famous and in print when she was 17 when she married a student from the university here in Kaifeng.
34:54And they spent a lot of time here in the great old Buddhist temple in the middle of town.
35:00Wandering its courtyards, making rice paper rubbings of its inscriptions.
35:07But recent feminist criticism here in China is giving us another view of her altogether.
35:13The strains within her marriage in a society dominated by men.
35:18The ambitions of a brilliant woman to find a voice that was not only interior and personal, but public and political.
35:30She was criticised by some at the time for saying things, for writing poetry.
35:35Women were not supposed to write poetry. This was, you know, a man thing.
35:39And poetry was one of the major ways of social interaction amongst men.
35:45You would go and drink a cup of wine and you would compose poetry with each other.
35:50You would say two lines of a poem and I would give you the next two lines.
35:54You would create new poetry in that way.
35:57Women could do this, but increasingly there were courtesans who did this.
36:01Respectable women didn't participate with men doing it.
36:05They still wrote, but we don't have very much surviving.
36:09A lot of women wrote poetry.
36:10A lot of women did write poetry, yes.
36:12Being published is a different matter, perhaps.
36:14That's right, yes, yes.
36:16Paradoxical period for women, isn't it, the song?
36:18You know, so many social advances, women's voice appearing strongly, perhaps, for the first time.
36:25And yet, foot binding starting to become widespread.
36:29It's very mixed because women become crucial to this political notion of loyalty.
36:35They have their equal part to play in that.
36:37But at the same time, they are also being...
36:41Their rights that they have previously had, their economic rights,
36:44are being taken away from them.
36:46So women could be highly educated,
36:49but to play their part in male-led Confucian society,
36:53women were to cultivate loyalty to father, husband and state,
36:58to ensure national cohesion.
37:00So wrote the leading conservative, the historian Summa Guang.
37:06But in the late 11th century, right up to the top,
37:11the old way of doing things was challenged.
37:14The leading light in the reformers was a man called Wang Anshu,
37:20a southerner who'd spent 20 years in local government.
37:24Wang pushed reforms across the board.
37:28Fairer taxes, government loans for the poor,
37:32new degrees in law and science,
37:34breaking down class barriers in the name of economic efficiency.
37:40With growing threats on its frontiers,
37:43the state had an enormous defence budget,
37:46and Wang thought a more open society would make the economy work better.
37:51The Confucian classics, the old way of doing things,
37:56were put in their place.
37:57They had to have practical application.
37:59And, of course, the old-fashioned Confucian bureaucrats were horrified,
38:03and they took their case to the emperor here in the palace in Kaifeng.
38:08The emperor favoured the reformers,
38:13but the conservatives in his council saw root and branch reform
38:17as potentially destabilising in uncertain times.
38:25In the winter of 1070,
38:28the great conservative opponent of the reforms, Summa Guang,
38:32petitioned the emperor.
38:34He said, we don't need these new laws.
38:36What we need are good men trained in the old ways.
38:41Look at the last 1,500 years of Chinese history,
38:45said Summa Guang.
38:47You'll see the periods of peace add up to only 300 years if that.
38:51This shows how hard it is to create order,
38:54and how hard you must work to keep it once you've got it.
38:59And he ended with this.
39:01I fear at the moment
39:04that our house may not be able to shelter our nation
39:09from the rains and the storms that are to come.
39:21It's one of the great what-ifs of history.
39:23At this point towards 1100,
39:26China could have become the first modern society,
39:29with the most egalitarian system of government
39:32anywhere before modern times.
39:34Why that didn't happen was due to events beyond their control,
39:38which would eventually overwhelm them.
39:41The last 50 years of Song China saw climate change and famine,
39:49and the incessant drumbeat of foreign armies on the frontiers.
39:53The mandate of heaven was not yet lost, but the harmony had gone.
40:09a contemporary wrote,
40:19A contemporary wrote,
40:34The problem was the wasting of national resources.
40:38Public opinion wanted defence spending, not grand building projects.
40:49The achievements of the Sung dynasty for a hundred years were amazing across every field of human endeavour.
41:04In 1101, the last great emperor of the United Northern and Southern Sung came to the throne, Huizong.
41:19He was a Renaissance prince, surrounded himself with poets and thinkers.
41:25He was an accomplished painter.
41:27In his wonderful gardens, he listened to symphonies by Buddhist musicians.
41:33But as he plunged deeper into his introverted speculations about sacred kingship, he lost touch with reality.
41:43When much harder choices were needed, choices about military expenditure and defence budgets.
41:56And deployment of armies as the barbarian forces gathered on the frontier.
42:01And when the crisis came, as he himself admitted,
42:07I myself was mediocre.
42:10And in the end, I failed the nation.
42:20The Song shared the East Asian landmass with many other states.
42:24And in the 1120s, Jurchen invaders swept down from the north.
42:35In 1127, the siege of Kaifeng began.
42:39It's one of the greatest, most poignant tragedies in Chinese history.
42:58Just imagine the scene.
43:00Thick snow swirling down from the sky.
43:02On the horizon, the gate towers of the outer city are on fire.
43:06Many of the houses are burning.
43:08And here, inside the walls of the inner city,
43:11are hundreds of thousands of terrified citizens of Kaifeng,
43:16still resisting hopelessly.
43:19The food's run out, the markets are empty.
43:22There are rumours even that people are eating human flesh.
43:26And the government now try to buy off the invaders,
43:28but there are no cards left to play when they give gold.
43:31The invaders want more.
43:33They want millions of ounces of gold and silver.
43:37They want precious silks and fine wines.
43:40They want antiques and temple bells and ritual vessels.
43:44They want the musical instruments played by the imperial orchestra.
43:49And they want people.
43:51They want craftsmen.
43:53But especially, they want women.
43:55They want the ladies-in-waiting from the imperial palace.
44:00They want the 1,500 female musicians who used to play before the emperor.
44:05They want the wives and daughters of the royal family and the courtiers
44:09and the leading citizens all to be delivered to their great camps
44:13to the north and south of the city.
44:15And, of course, many of those women committed suicide rather than go.
44:19And so the city which symbolises the very best that civilisation had yet achieved on earth
44:28was brought to nothing.
44:34In a bitter poem on the government's incompetence,
44:38Li Qingzhao reflected on the catastrophe.
44:40An age of glory passed like a lightning flash.
44:48The troops of the northern barbarians appeared as if they had dropped from heaven.
44:56Tartar horses paraded in front of your banqueting hall
44:59and trampled pearls and emeralds into the fragrant dust.
45:12What a waste of time it was for great artists to carve your name into polished cliffs.
45:19The mandate of heaven passed from you, but you didn't see.
45:25Times change and power passes.
45:30It is the pity of the world.
45:32The emperor Huizong and thousands of his courtiers were seized and taken north where they died in captivity.
45:54But his brother fled beyond the reach of the invaders across the Yangtze River
45:59and vast numbers of refugees followed.
46:05You get a great sense of a Chinese medieval village from here, don't you?
46:10The big difference would be that today the houses are made out of brick and concrete.
46:15Then they would have been wooden-framed, wooden-fronted houses like those old ones over there.
46:21And the people here were not scholars and bureaucrats,
46:24they were boatmen and dockers and warehousemen.
46:35And among the millions who fled south was the poet Li Qingzhao.
46:43Those who lived in the west of the Yangtze River basin fled east.
46:46Those in north fled south.
46:50Those in the hills fled to the cities.
46:56Those in cities fled to the hills.
47:00Hello.
47:01And in the end there was no one who was not uprooted.
47:14And I myself, Li Qingzhao, fled upstream, crossed the river near the rapids and got to Jinhua.
47:21There I found a place to live in the house of the Chen family.
47:27And there, after all the terror and all the hardship, I found some peace of mind.
47:33And so the patient and long-suffering Chinese people set out once more, as they have so often, to rebuild.
47:54Refusing to give up on the Song dream.
47:57And it was here in the south, in the 12th century, that Chinese civilisation was reborn in what we call the Southern Song.
48:10Up to this point the south has been politically and to some degree economically somewhat more peripheral to the north.
48:16But now is the moment when that completely changes.
48:18More and more people are settling in the south, more and more commerce and so on is developing in the south.
48:31And the economy booms.
48:35China is, in a sense, moving.
48:37It's moving from this very northern orientation, a northern east-west orientation,
48:42to a much more compact southeastern orientation that tends to be how we think of China now.
48:48The site they chose for the new capital was a then unimportant place called Hanzhou, standing on the West Lake, one of China's loveliest spots.
49:03The Chinese have a proverb.
49:05In heaven there is paradise, but here on earth there are Suzhou and Hanzhou.
49:10In fact, the story goes Hanzhou was chosen because of the beauty of its landscape.
49:16And here they set out to recreate the lost city of dreams.
49:20There's a wonderful Chinese description from that time which gives you a sense of the landscape that has enchanted Chinese poets and painters for more than a thousand years.
49:31Like a camera panning along the horizon from the blue-grey hills across the tranquil surface of the lake.
49:38And there where the landscape flattens, glittering like fish scales, the brightly glazed tiles of a myriad rooftops.
49:47Here there was every conceivable amenity of civilisation.
49:54So in Hanzhou, Song civilisation was restored.
50:05From the people's culture to practical government.
50:10There were fire stations, hospitals, old people's homes and even dance pavilions.
50:15When the Italian Marco Polo came here in the 13th century, he called it the best city on earth.
50:27There were shops selling beauty products, make-up and face cream, eyeliner, false hair.
50:34If shopping in Hanzhou hadn't worn you out, you could repair to tea shops or wine bars or storytelling houses
50:43or huge public theatres.
50:46And if that wasn't enough at the end of the evening, you could go to fabulously appointed exclusive hostess bars
50:53where the most famous courtesans of the time would serenade you with beautiful music.
50:58There was even a gay club.
51:08But to really understand the remaking of the song world,
51:10you have to leave the glitter of Hanzhou behind.
51:15That's lovely.
51:19Out in the countryside south of the river,
51:22the southern Song planted hundreds of new towns and villages
51:27to supply the capital with food and coal and timber.
51:30And here, at the grassroots, they passed on the cultural ethos of the Song.
51:44Even now, in the old county towns, you can meet descendants of the governing class.
51:50Ni hao.
51:52Hello.
51:53This is Chishan town, an old Song trading place.
51:59Here, in Mr. Xie's crumbling family house, the sign board proudly salutes his ancestors
52:06who passed the Song civil service exile.
52:08Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.
52:14Let me just ask you about the sign above. What does that say?
52:19What kind of thing?
52:21Jigis?
52:22Jigis.
52:23Jigis.
52:24Jigis.
52:25Why do you think Jigis in a pinch?
52:27On the項目, when to see Jigis, the altar of Shang and Book,
52:29the ENJW είναι team na�를kaough,
52:31after the year in Kenes娘 tookenbranzed by so-called uncle,
52:36but it was lucky to see what they sow.
52:38We both have Jigis.
52:40The ANJW and His master of Shang also tookenbranzed by that.
52:45Here we have the statue again for the poly disagree,
52:46and despite all the upheavals of the 20th century the old ideals are still passed on
53:00upstairs in the altar room wooden plucks name the ancestors stretching back a thousand years
53:07how many ancestors are commemorated here
53:09oh wow so it's one of the biggest uh family lineages in china
53:30oh it's so touching across the generations the thread connecting the living with the dead
53:37the song ethos of virtue duty and confucian morality
53:46in the 1100s here in the south great thinkers like jiu xi shape the confucian ethos of china
53:53until today jiu xi wrote china's most influential book after confucius
54:01a handbook to family rituals it was said you could find one in every home in china
54:07in the 19th century it's about the mutual dependence of family and ancestors as jiu xi said
54:16part of the state's effort to guide and transform the people
54:22but the old cycles of chinese history now returned to haunt them
54:28in the 13th century the world was turned upside down by the mongols
54:40led by genghis khan their armies swept west as far as the walls of vienna
54:47they overran northern china creating the most extensive empire in history
54:52and then they gradually spread their power into the lands of the southern sung by land and sea
55:04until the last terrible battle
55:06it was march the 19th 1279
55:15dark day in the story of china
55:17we're here almost exactly on the anniversary and it was a day just like this
55:27with rain and drizzle
55:29by the evening you couldn't see the far shore
55:32the sun commanders had not defended the narrows here so the mongol fleet was able to sail through
55:39into the lagoon and there the sun navy faced them they had about a thousand ships lashed together to
55:46form a floating fortress their decks protected by wet mud to stop the effects of the fire projectiles
55:56from the mongol catapults when the battle began an eyewitness says the air was full of fiery traces of
56:04the mongol fire bombs but when the tide rose the mongols were able to encircle the sung fleet
56:12and in the end the battle was lost and the young emperor was trapped
56:20and then the emperor's loyal minister lu sufu made a famous speech to the little boy
56:27the affairs of our state have come to this but we must not disgrace the nation
56:35he took the boy in his arms he jumped into the sea to commit suicide
56:43the little boy's pet white parrot began to screech and flap its wings till it overbalanced the cage
56:50and fell into the water after its master so ended the glory of the sun
57:20so in the later 13th century china was defeated under alien rule shocked to the core
57:36the mandate of heaven was suspended but it was not lost
57:43for china's cycles of order and disorder will continue
57:48another great age will arise as in china it always does
57:55one of the great eras of high civilization in world history
58:02but they won't follow the brilliant experiments of the song on the path to modernity
58:09instead the experience of defeat will give birth to a new kind of despotism
58:16the new dynasty will be the bringers of light
58:20the ming
58:25the ming
58:33food to enjoy in rick stein's taste of shanghai as part of china season monday on bbc2 at nine
58:39claire balding with a lineup of sporting star guests including snooker legend jimmy white coming up on her show in a moment
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